Does Francis Bacon's life story matter? Prominent Sydney artists say his ideas still wield a strong influence but the viewer's physical ''sensation'' when seeing his art is more important than the Irish-born painter's biography.

Twenty years after Bacon's death, as a retrospective of more than 50 of his paintings opens at the Art Gallery of NSW on Saturday, readings of his output vary widely.

Bacon ''made paintings less about the unconscious and more about the psychology of humanity'', says painter Ben Quilty, a lone voice with this view as he toured the exhibition on Thursday. ''Painting must have been a very cathartic thing and he faced a lot of loss in his life … lovers and friends who died young in tragic circumstances. In some ways, being meditative by making work about that experience is very helpful.''

Quilty, 39, who won last year's Archibald Prize and went to Afghanistan as an official war artist, gives an essentially psychological and biographical reading of Bacon's subjects such as the crucifixion of Jesus, death by electric chair, serial killings and screaming human forms.

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''The subject matter doesn't get much darker. Comparing him as a painter to a philosopher, in some way trying to understand behaviour, was a part of his practice,'' Quilty says. ''By making a form of the psychology that goes into making someone do something so horrendous to another person, even if you're trying to subconsciously understand that part of humanity, you're trying to understand yourself.''

But Bacon distanced himself from any psychological reading of his work, insists Julie Rrap, an artist who works with installations, photography and sculpture. ''He thought it was too obvious a reading to write his work off as some sort of cathartic expression of action,'' says Rrap, 62. ''He talked about this whole idea of trying to represent sensation. In saying he wants to paint the scream, not the horror of it, he's trying to get some sort of feeling across without being specific about it.

''He was trying to say, 'This is not about me or my state of being; this is about me using the medium I have to allow other people to have a sensation and response'.''

Painter and installation artist Anthony Lister, well known for his street art, found Bacon through the late Sydney artist Brett Whiteley, whose canvases painted as early as the 1960s in London owed a great deal to Bacon's figurative style.

''It's hard not to be influenced by an awesome alcoholic who keeps his studio in such clean order,'' quips Lister, 33. ''I consider Bacon an adventure painter. He had a keen eye and an adventurous spirit. Some of his paintings were completely gruesome; some of them were completely awful; it has a [Francisco de] Goya streak to it. But it's also the opposite to Goya, where there were narratives.

''Bacon really just spewed out what was inside him. He took a piece of a puzzle and carried it on. I like that he wasn't into narratives; it gives his work this ambiguous, find-it-yourself equation.''

Exhibition-goers should eschew ''the usual reading of overt violence and morbidity'', says sculptor, installation and performance artist Ken Unsworth. Bacon was all about ''that essential mystery within the folds of life itself - that has echoes in what I intuitively lean towards or try to engage with in my own work''.

Focusing on Bacon's life in his paintings ''short-circuits the imaginative ways you can interpret the work''. The public should abandon psychological readings.

''His psychology I see more as a psychosis,'' says Unsworth, 81, who will compare Bacon to contemporaries Pablo Picasso and Lucian Freud in the first of several artist talks planned for Art After Hours during the exhibition.

''Picasso was more intellectual and more interested in formal constructs and developing new languages and new forms, while Freud was more interested in the truths and history of the human body and approached that in a very forensic but nevertheless aesthetically beautiful way.

''Bacon was more of the inner-self and the inner-life … [He was] solely interested in the figure and being able to create the sort of dilemmas of the human condition in a very voluble, personal way.''

Francis Bacon: Five Decades is at the Art Gallery of NSW from Saturday to February 24.